Movie Review: Kaanchi

A young girl seeks revenge on a corrupt industrialist cum political family after their young heir murders her one and only true love. That’s a story most likely to be found in a time capsule. It would fit in the ’80s and ’90s like a charm. But in 2014, it’s as jaded as a phone with a keypad. But that is exactly what Subhash Ghai’s Kaanchi is about. A tale of innocence lost in the travails of a crooked world. Mukta Arts needs a solid firmware upgrade to get it in line with what’s in and what’s not.

What doesn’t happen in the modern world is that ordinary village folk don’t participate in inter gender cycle races. Village youth do not setup military training camps to fend off corrupt politicians and industrialists. Painters don’t turn into blood hungry psychopaths upon a girl’s rejection. Young people don’t kiss like fish. You don’t need to run over a man thrice to kill him. No matter how rich you are, you don’t shoot an HD TV with a handgun. You don’t carefully peel every slice of an orange just to throw it into a bin. Police inspectors don’t perform item numbers at night clubs. Petite women don’t throw a sledge hammer to twenty feet with deadly accuracy. The world unfortunately is a lot less dramatic than such cinematic liberties.

Subhash Ghai has made films like Vishwanath, Karz, Vidhata, Hero, Karma, Meri Jung, Saudagar, Khalnayak, Pardes and so many more classics. You can’t accept such an undercooked film from the showman of our industry. Unfortunately Kaanchi is far from the quality you’d expect from its director. The very choice of Kaanchi being Ghai’s protagonist baffles you. She uses coarse terms like “jhand” and “kutta” at free will. Instead of being feisty and impressionable lass, she comes across as a certified brat. Why on earth would you sympathise with a person who can’t even talk straight to their own mother? But you’re forced to go on a journey with this rather crude girl where she swears to avenge her lover’s death and brings down a ruling Politician, his businessman brother and his maniacal painter of a son. And she does it without any help from anyone in a city like Mumbai. And to top off the exasperating absence of logic, a CBI officer decides to let her walk away, by giving his subordinate a lecture on how the little girl fought the big bad world.

Its baffling to see veterans like Rishi Kapoor and Mithun Chakraborty improvise and experiment with conviction in a film that’s so sub-par in quality. It doesn’t help that the leads Mishti (as Kaanchi) and Kartik Tiwari (her ill-fated lover) give such listless performances. The music, which is always a strength of a Subhash Ghai film is totally flat. The only thing that works in the film is the cinematography. There are some clinically executed shots that look like paintings. But when it comes to the content, there’s nothing substantial.

At two hours and twenty minutes, Kaanchi feels like a gruelling cinematic ride. You’re teased with A-list shot taking and composition and but served an amateur narrative and story. It just doesn’t have the magic of a Subhash Ghai film. Legends don’t make average fare.